Principal Product Manager - AI Literacy Platform

About Magpie

At Magpie, we envision a world where every child, no matter their background, becomes a confident reader. Our nonprofit team combines research-backed instruction, joyful game design, and cutting-edge AI to tackle America’s reading crisis head-on — with the goal of eradicating illiteracy through a digital-first, student-centered approach.

Role Summary

We’re seeking an experienced Principal Product Manager to lead the design, execution, and delivery of personalized, AI-enhanced foundational literacy products. This PM will be instrumental in building experiences that meet every child where they are, seamlessly integrate high-fidelity assessments, and deliver engaging, research-based learning moments — all while unlocking actionable insights for educators and families.

What You’ll Do:

• Drive end-to-end product development for personalized learning pathways, AI-powered practice, and formative assessments — from shaping vision to delivering live impact in classrooms.
• Deeply embed user research and data insights to inform product strategy and prioritize features that maximize student growth and teacher usability.
• Partner cross-functionally with engineering, academics, design, data science, and implementation teams to deliver high-quality, joyful student experiences that align with our learning science principles.
• Integrate data, assessment, and efficacy rigor and personalization engines to ensure every learner’s progress is tracked, analyzed, and used to adapt their reading journey.
• Champion a culture of measurement, using clear success criteria, KPIs, and user data to inform decisions and iterate quickly.
• Communicate vision and progress clearly to leadership, funders, and partner organizations, grounding plans in evidence and user stories.

Requirements

A strong candidate will possess:

✅ Proven product management experience (5–8+ years) shipping student-facing digital learning products at scale — ideally in K–8 literacy or learning science.

✅ Demonstrated success leading AI- or data-driven personalization features in an edtech or consumer learning context.

✅ Strong grasp of instructional data, personalization, game and/or assessment design and how to translate assessment data into actionable insights and adaptive experiences.

✅ Deep user empathy and experience designing for joyful, identity-affirming learning for diverse student communities.

✅ Ability to align research, design, engineering, and operations to deliver on time, at quality, and with clear metrics.

✅ Comfort navigating nonprofit mission and revenue trade-offs, balancing short-term product-market fit with long-term vision to eradicate illiteracy.

Within your first 30 days, you will:

• Ramp up on Magpie’s platform, K–2 assessment launch, engineering work processes, and overall product strategy.
• Build context on assessment models, technical architecture, and data capabilities.
• Establish relationships across engineering, design, data, and learning science.
• Identify immediate areas where you can add capacity and impact.

By day 60, you’re:

• Engaging with Magpie’s priorities and aligning product work to critical outcomes.
• Driving feature assessment strategy by balancing AI-driven, ethical and traditional approaches.
• Supporting market-facing and in-development components to ensure readiness for release.
• Beginning to influence key decisions on the learning engine and platform integration.

By day 90, you will:

• Take ownership of core product areas, particularly around data, and using advanced analytics to guide decisions.
• Lead the planning and execution of upcoming 3–8 assessment builds, positioning the roadmap as a future-forward strategy and a key selling point for Magpie.
• Drive clarity and alignment across stakeholders to ensure product releases are well-defined, validated, and delivered with confidence.
• Operate as a product leader, connecting data, engineering, and product strategy to accelerate Magpie’s impact.

What Success Looks Like:

• Thousands more students meet reading proficiency benchmarks via personalized skill pathways.
• High-quality assessment data seamlessly fuels adaptive instruction and teacher dashboards.
• Students engage joyfully with literacy practice, building confidence and agency.
• Partners and internal teams trust and champion your product plans because they see measurable impact.

Benefits

What You'll Receive:

• Salary range of $165,000 - $200,000 per annum
• Competitive medical, dental, vision benefits
• Opportunity to work remotely for a mission-driven company full of change-makers
• Enjoy the freedom of flexible time off to balance work and personal life, ensuring you stay refreshed and productive.
• 401k with 4% guaranteed match
• Work environment that values balance and harmony with a deep commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion
• Opportunity to travel and meet your team members in-person 2x per year

Join Us

At Magpie, your work will directly unlock the great reader in every child. If you’re ready to lead with purpose, build with urgency, and partner with a mission-driven team to solve one of America’s biggest educational challenges — we want to hear from you.

More about Magpie Literacy

We are on a mission to unlock the great reader in every child to end illiteracy in our country -- centering the experiences of Black, Latino, and Native American students and students experiencing poverty. We are developing research-based, identity-affirming PK-8+ digital literacy tools that leverage student uniquenesses to help every child master the foundational reading skills needed to become strong, confident readers. We’re currently hiring our founding team of mission-driven individuals committed to helping us develop a scalable, impactful reading product that helps us eradicate illiteracy in America.

Illuminate Literacy is fiscally sponsored by Cambiar Education, a 501c3 that supports transformative leaders of public school systems and educational entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions that disrupt the patterns of educational inequity.

🔥 Key Highlights 🔥

• Two fully digital prototypes built and currently being tested with a dozen schools and out-of-school partners; MVP kindergarten offering will be released fall 2023
• Fully-funded sister R&D organization, AERDF Reading Reimagined, to explore major unknowns in literacy learning for priority students and to bridge cutting-edge research to practice
• Founding team with deep expertise in teaching kids to read, on technology, at scale, comprised of literacy experts, practitioners, designers, engineers, and former education systems leaders. Founded and led by Rebecca Kockler, former Assistant Superintendent of Academic Content for the Louisiana Department of Education and developer of the nationally recognized ELA Guidebooks
• Extensive relationships with major systems leaders across the country requesting to be co-designers and first adopters; 100% retention of current partners year over year
• Commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and to an inclusive R&D and product development approach that centers Black, Latino and Native American students and those experiencing poverty